Abstract
Alfred Schutz’s successful restitution of the social everyday world suffers from a certain moral abstinence which tends to leave the everyday to mere pragmatics. Our paper aims to overcome this shortcoming already noticed by Aron Gurwitsch. The everyday morality we are looking for is highly ambiguous. On the one hand, there is a mere common-sense morality absorbed by what everybody says and does. On the other hand, there is a morality which is incorporated in our everyday world and distributed among various vocational fields like medicine, law, technique or politics, but which exceeds what is common. Our everyday is not simply normal, but results from a process of normalisation. As Max Weber stresses, our everyday world contrasts with what is beyond the everyday. In order to discover this excess we need what Husserl calls an ethical epoché. This break has to be completed by a responsive epoché turning back to the demands to which our common speaking and doing responds. Such a responsive kind of ethics is largely inconspicuous, functioning as a sort of tacit morals. Robert Musil warns us against the over-consumption of morals which would extinguish the sparks of an intensified morality which keep us alive.
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Notes
- 1.
I refer to my discussion of this debate in the essay “Die verachtete Doxa” (Waldenfels 1986).
- 2.
For a distinction and evaluation of the different ordering factors that determine the field of action, I refer to Order in the Twilight (1996: Chapter B).
- 3.
On the contrary, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in their work Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit, by no means evade conflicts, but appealing to the power of the legitimators (1969: 117), they provide a solution from which Schutz obviously shies away. Nothing would be easier than appealing to the “normative force of the factual” in a legal-positivistic way. Cf. my article “Im Labyrinth des Alltags” (Waldenfels 1985: 161).
- 4.
Concerning the dubious conditions of a phenomenological philosophy of values, I refer to my critical study “Wertqualitäten oder Erfahrungsansprüche?” (Waldenfels 1995).
- 5.
The exemplary rank that music occupies in social theory is demonstrated by numerous single studies the publication of which is currently being prepared by Andreas Stascheit.
- 6.
In these words, Schutz refers to Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, cf. Barber (2004: 145). Concerning the important role of vocational attitude, cf. not only the two grand speeches on vocation by Max Weber, but also Husserl’s Crisis, § 35, where the vocational worlds are analyzed as particular worlds of the life-world.
- 7.
- 8.
The distinction between direct and indirect forms of communication goes back to Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript; Schutz refers to it in his essay “Über die mannigfachen Wirklichkeiten” (Schutz 1962: 243–4, 254–98) Cf. moreover the author’s Vielstimmigkeit der Rede (Waldenfels 1999: Preface: “Indirekte Rede”).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
With the high degree of specialization of research, reliability and concomitantly ethics, also gain in importance in science.
- 12.
The essay that Peter Berger has dedicated to Schutz and Musil (Berger 1983) touches upon our topic in the form of Musil’s opposition between everyday and “the other state,” yet it does not contribute much to the question about an everyday morality in Schutz.
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Waldenfels, B. (2014). Everyday Morality. Questions with and for Alfred Schutz. In: Staudigl, M., Berguno, G. (eds) Schutzian Phenomenology and Hermeneutic Traditions. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 68. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6034-9_12
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